Try being a new user with an unpopular position and the comments in boingboing are anything other than civil and polite. The overton window of what can be discussed politely and civilly on boingboing is fairly narrow. Those who don’t agree with the boingboing hivemind are largely chased away while new accounts.
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As one of the moderators on an >10K subscriber subreddit, I can assure you 99% of the people don’t get that idea.
“Like the !!FIRST!!1!!! cooo-oo-ooooomment”
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I’m a fan of slashdot style system but it’s not invulnerable to punishment by moderation. Metamoderation works to counteract that but can also make it worse depending on how metamoderators get selected. The main thing this new comment system seems to be doing is forcing medamoderation into the foundation of everything rather than selecting metamoderators after the fact. I’m interested to see how that works out.
I think the biggest advantages of the slashdot style system is that it forces you to think about how you’re moderating posts, and limits both the number of points you have to use and the number each post can benefit from. Keep users thinking about the act of moderating and they’ll moderate better. When there’s a housekeeping post on slashdot or soylentnews about the moderation system, how people use it improves noticeably for a while.
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Can you link to an example of one such exchange for context?
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You can take a look at my history. My very first exchange on this account resulted in my being dog piled and then temporarily banned.
Yeah, I saw your first comment. You chose to introduce yourself to BB by complaining about how horribly, horribly sexist it was to organize an event where girls could celebrate their geekery in a safe space free of harassment. Then you doubled down on charges of misandry even though said event didn’t actually exclude men as you claimed.
Your “unpopular position” was met with mockery because it was demonstrably wrong and worthy of mockery. Even so, no one screamed that you were a fascist or threatened to rape your mother. Just because no one else supports your position doesn’t mean a conversation lacks all semblance of civility.
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I don’t know if more exchanges were deleted, but I admit that I find it hard to see “dog piling,” and instead see “several people (five, specifically) disagreeing with you.”
I think it’s true that if you come in with a minority opinion then most likely multiple other people will disagree with you, but that’s kind of the definition of a minority opinion. No comment system should be policing commenters solely because someone’s opinion is out-numbered.
And yes, you were accused of trolling, which is not helpful because the accused usually takes offense, but it is often hard to distinguish someone who is genuine in his or her controversial (for the community) opinions, and those who are trying to get reactions. And frequently they are one and the same.
If there were other private or deleted exchanges, though, I’m not aware of them so can’t comment.
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So you would describe the response as civil? And please note, it ended with me being banned. Very welcoming, such wonderful debate. I’m not about to go over the actual subject matter again here though. that would would take us far off the point, and pretty fast.
Accused and banned. I agree it can be hard to tell. But the scales seem pretty heavily weighted in favor of one assumption here.
I don’t think the responses showed a lot of respect for your stated opinion, but that’s not really the same thing.
The worst name-calling in that conversation was a not-especially-vitriolic accusation of driving trollies. By internet comment section standards that’s about as civil a discussion as you could ask for.
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Suspended, not banned. And the commenters here can’t do that, so you must have somehow upset the moderators (presumably the ‘be cool’ rule).
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To be fair, if all there was was what we saw in the exchange, I can see why a suspension can feel like a pretty severe slap in the face. @seanodonnell was not being particularly uncivil.
I guess the moderators’ preference is for no arguing, and that’s their prerogative, but it does feel a little like “no dissenting opinions.”
Indeed, one of the downsides of engaging in a 5-vs-1 argument is that the “1” end up writing lots of replies, and that makes it look like they are going out of their way to fight, instead of the actuality that they are simply replying to everyone.
I won’t second-guess the moderating, because they’ve made it clear that this is “their house,” and they can block people they disagree with. You may or may not agree with that position, but it is their position.
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Yes, this is 100% true. Civility is a shared practice and challenging. It’s not something that comes out of a box which is an added compelling reason to prefer open networks and computing.
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